The Ents Almost Finished...

I have been back to work on the Ents marching on Orthanc!

I have been adding colors in glazes recently using mostly just oil with a bit of Walnut Alkyd Medium when needed. The next step is to go in and recapture all the shadows again.  After that, it's final highlights and a unifying glaze and we're done.

Gandalf Oil

A little while back I did a quick sketch of Gandalf in anticipation of the opening of The Hobbit. At the request of a collector I did a finished oil version of it and wanted to share it.

 Oil on panel 

11" x 14"

A little side note for anyone who has followed along with my misadventures in oil these past few years: You have probably heard me complain many times before that I couldn't seem to work in oil without using solvents, but that if did use solvents, that I would always end up having this allergic reaction where I would grow fangs, claws, and an unruly beehive haircut. I would then of course go roaming about the neighborhood howling at the moon, ravening for meat-flavored things.  

This oil was done without the use of any solvents whatsoever. It was done using only walnut alkyd oil, and using only oil pigments that tend to dry faster. (siennas, umbers, pthalos, etc.) So far I haven't grown a single beehive haircut, which is pretty exciting.  

Early sketch on toned paper

So.... Anyone else excited about The Hobbit this week?

The Silmarillion: Luthien

The Silmarillion: Glorfindel and the Balrog

The Silmarillion: Glaurung

To see more from the Silmarillion project, check out the rest of the show at Gallery Nucleus.

The Silmarillion: Fingon and Gothmog

"Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs, high-captain of Angband, was come; and he drove a dark wedge between the Elvenhosts, surrounding King Fingon, and thrusting Turgon and Hurin aside towards the Fen of Serech. Then he turned upon Fingon. That was a grim meeting. At last Fingon stood with his guard dead about him..."

-From The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

More imagery from the The Silmarillion show on display at Gallery Nucleus.

Show Opening: The Silmarillion

On April 14, I will be having a show at Gallery Nucleus. The show is based around J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.

This piece is from the fall of Glorfindel, which is a precursor to a similar event that takes place in the Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf confronts the Balrog in Moria. 

Not much is written about this particular scene in the Silmarillion.  In fact, it lasts only 2 lines, which end in: "...And both fell to ruin in the abyss."  But it is one of the things I love a great deal about Tolkien, that he creates such a rich world, that even really brief passages are loaded with possibilities.

The show will feature watercolor paintings as well as studies and developmental drawings. I will be posting more of these in the weeks to come.  For more information on it check out the post on Gallery Nucleus's website.

The Forest Troll: Digital Trickery

I am working in Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the digital final for this painting. (You don't always need the latest and greatest in software, but CS5 is amazingly stable by comparison to CS4 or CS3, both of which would crash regularly based on alignment of certain stars and lunar cycles. And on Tuesdays. And really just any time that they felt like crashing.)

  

Up until the halfway point I work in only multiply layers.  I am using these layers very much like thin transparent watercolor or acrylic washes.  

Digital Work In Progress: Midway Point

After the midway point I will switch into other layer modes, like screen and color dodge for highlighting. And some normal layers for opaque details. 

Final Digital 

You will notice that I added a few elements to the image at this stage, like the extra foreground foliage. These were decisions made after letting the painting sit for a few days and then coming back to it with a fresh pair of eyes.  It can be a risky business to always be going back and correcting an image.  Sometimes it is better to just leave your first ideas alone and move on to work on new projects. (You hear me Lucas?)  I will only do it if I feel I absolutely have to.   In this case, I had lost some of the forest-ness of the scene, and wanted to recapture a bit of it.

Troll Detail

Dwarf Detail

Thank you everyone for all the support and really helpful feedback!  You guys are awesome.

The Forest Troll Part VII: Watercolor

13" x 21" 

Watercolor and Pencil on Heavyweight Bristol

Next: Digital Trickery

The Forest Troll Part VI: Tight Pencil Drawing

I am much happier with the composition this time around. Starting over from scratch generally involves an entire day of suicidal behavior and all-time-lows.  So it's always a good feeling to know that it was the right choice.
The trees do what I had hoped that they would do and the image is a lot more comfortable to look at now.

(Well... unless giant trolls with clubs make you uncomfortable. In which case there may be no hope for the image.)

Next: Watercolor

The Forest Troll Part V: Bungling It

Sometimes, in spite of all the precautions and idiot-proofing, I still manage to bungle things.

 In this case, I got halfway through the initial washes of the watercolor before realizing that I had screwed up the composition and it was really hurting the image. Since I wasn't under any particular deadline for the piece and I hadn't gone that far yet, I decided to start over. Under other circumstances I would have tried to fix it by painting in the corrections or reworking it digitally. Since I had the time though, I decided to repaint it.

Here is why it was bad:

THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH

A triangle of death is an area of the image where the composition allows the viewer to get trapped and leaves part of the image as dead space. In this case, the foreground branches at the top left lead down to the troll's face, which then points down to the boars and the helmet. This would be ok except that the sharp verticals in the background trees pull us back up into those branches, creating a self-contained compositional form that splits the image, leaving the dwarves, who are a main narrative element, as a separate dead space.

The strong red arrow in the middle shows the line where the image gets split. This can still work if you have text that goes in your image, or if this image were to be intended for a wrap-around book cover. Since my goal was a stand alone poster image, this compositional dead space was a failure.

How to solve this?
I didn't want to monkey with the characters, because I really like their arrangement and relation to one another. So I decided to employ a classical solution that has been used by artists for centuries: When in doubt, add more trees. 

Reworked Composition

 By placing this organic tree shape over the boars I am able to break the Triangle of Death and keep the composition moving, while at the same time adding more interest to the image itself.

Next: Tight Pencil Drawing

The Forest Troll Part IV: Color Comp and Drawing

The color comp is done as fast as possible. I don't want to get bogged down in the details here. This is all about the mood and atmosphere.

Color Comp

The main goals of the color comp are:

#1 Nail down the lighting.
(Sources, direction, strength. etc.)

#2 Nail down the value relations.
For instance, the tree behind the dwarves: is it more attractive as darker than the background or lighter? By exploring and solving this in the color comp I will be more confident when I tackle it in the final image.

 #3 Nail down the color theory.
This image will be confined to a warmer spectrum, one that you might find at midday in an old growth forest with patches of sunlight breaking through the canopy. I wanted to make most of the tones fall in a rather narrow color gamut, and then choose a bright color outside this gamut as an accent. In this case, it was mostly golds and browns accented with a bright green.
In the color comp I just want to make sure this theme will work for my image. I go through this on almost all of my pieces because my brain is incapable of solving value/color mixtures on the fly, so I need a cheat sheet. The color comp helps me idiot-proof my image so I don't bungle it in the final.

Tight Drawing

The Forest Troll Part III: Troll Studies

As some of you may remember I did several studies for our Forest Troll's bloodhound boars in a previous post.  Check them out here.

Next: Color Comp and Composite Drawing

The Forest Troll Part II: Dwarf Studies

Next: Troll Studies

The Forest Troll Part I: Thumbnails

One of the great things about the worlds that Tolkien creates are the half-mentioned places and events that are going on in the background of Middle Earth. By hinting at them and leaving them a bit mysterious, Tolkien gives the reader a chance to use their imagination and place themselves inside the world and explore it for themselves.

 Many of us, when we read stories like these, like to imagine ourselves there in the background as clever, dangerous warriors, or as powerful wizards and the like. We don't ever just place ourselves in there as hapless serfs who get ordered around a lot and eventually eaten. Or as complete bunglers for that matter.

 Which led me to an idea for a painting that I plan to share with you over the next few weeks as it develops. Here's an initial thumbnail:

 Makes sense right?

 Let me explain: A few months ago, I went mountain biking with a few of my friends. At the beginning of the trail ride my friend Asher listed off the names of the trails we would be on which would lead to which, and I sort of heard, but mostly didn't. We started riding and things were going well until I got myself into a spectacular wreck that involved several roots, 2 large trees, a stream and possibly a rabid squirrel.
 I had been in the rear of our caravan, and my friends hadn't witnessed my mishap (thankfully). While I was glad to be spared the embarrassment of having them see me wipe-out and then ask me if I needed training wheels or a squirrel-proof suit, I was dismayed to realize that I had lost them completely. I put myself back together and kept biking in hopes of eventually catching up with them, but it was no good. They were all experienced master Jedi mountain bikers and I was but a padawan learner. After a while I came to a fork in the trail, but the trail names were unfamiliar. Was it Firetower or Pipsissewa? I know he had said it was one of these trails, but I couldn't remember which one. So I took one at random and got myself randomly lost. 

It occurred to me, while I was out there bewildered and lost, that if this were war, I would probably have just gotten us all killed. Had I gone to war, I would probably have fought very hard, and then died very fast because of something really stupid, like mishearing the coordinates on a map, and getting myself caught by friendly mortar fire.

This image was a result of that. If I were wandering around in the background of Tolkien's world, I'd probably have been a dwarf. Not a legendary warrior, or a powerful orc chieftain or a wizard, but A dwarf whose helmet hadn't been tied quite right, and who got himself and his band into a lot of trouble.

 When I got back from the trail ride, I scribbled this thumbnail down:

This is often what my thumbnails look like, with little notes pointing out important narrative details.

 Over the next few weeks I will be posting up the progress and development of the rest of the piece.  And we'll see if our dwarf can make it out of the mess he has gotten himself into.
Stay tuned.

Tor.com LoTR vs The Hobbit Post

Gorbag of Mordor

I recently contributed to an article on Tor.com written by Irene Gallo on which of Tolkien's stories illustrators found most interesting for subjects to illustrate.

This is of course, a little like asking if one prefers chocolate chip cookie dough, or baked chocolate chip cookies. But there is an interesting difference in the two that begins to rise to the surface when you begin to discuss it.

The Hobbit is told from the viewpoint of a charming and not altogether reliable narrator in Bilbo, and the Lord of the Rings feels like it is told from the viewpoint of several different poet-historians who are not as given to the same vagaries of imagination as Bilbo. Because of this I find that the Hobbit allows a little more creative expression, especially in regards to the monsters. (And I love monsters who are just a little human.)

But The Lord of the Rings changes that, and the monsters there, are indeed monsters with only rare instances of humanity. But the humans there are deeper, and there we find the issue flipped, where now we find humans, who are just a little bit monster. Especially as they deal with matters of sons dying, or addiction. This too makes for an interesting vantage point to work from. Donato in particular writes that he finds that there are more opportunities that reveal the compassion and humanity of the characters in the Lord of the Rings, and so it presents a greater source of inspiration for his work.

Its an interesting article with contributions from Howe, Nasmith, Donato, Bosma, Adolfsson, Hickman, Kaluta and Miller.

A Dark Horror from the Last Age

I show you just this portion of the piece because the rest is too horrifying to show.  

What could possibly make it horrifying? After all, its 2 friends wandering in a sparkling tunnel with bright lights. It should be a recipe for the warm, happy feelings one might associate with Tolkien's literature. 

You should sit down for this, and you should be prepared to run from your computer the minute you see the images below. (I have already run from my computer 3 times just trying to post this.)

Here is the sketch:

Nothing unsustainable yet, right?  So far, so good. I drew this while in a dank subway car in the bowels of France. 

It seems harmless enough right?  A simple, straightforward composition with medium figures in a dark environment.

And so I thought, this will be a great first piece to do for an illustration based on material from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  I have wanted to paint some illustrations based on this awesome story for a while. For the first piece I wanted to attack what for me, has always been the most terrifying and gripping in the story: Shelob's Lair.  

Page 3 of my collection of nightmares. 

My thumbnail seemed solid enough, and seemed to have the right amount of tension in it.  So I started doing my developmental sketches for this. One of the first things I did was to draw several hundred gestures of spiders.  This is a mistake.   

At about number 36 I realized just what soulless terrors spiders can be when seen close enough to make out distinguishable features.  

Unholy Terror # 36

(BTW Thank you Uglyoverload.com for the excellent reference and for the regular updates on hideous creatures that I was perfectly fine before I found out existed.)

In spite of the general horror of these sketches, I persevered.  I thought, "well, these are terrifying and I now have the shakes and won't be able to sleep for weeks, but hey, I'll bet I'll feel a lot better after I knock up a more finished sketch."  

(Now is a good time to stop looking at your computer screen)

I do not feel better. 

After I did this I took several large steps away from my desk and looked for an adult.  Finding none but me in the house, I took 3 showers, then ran back in like batman and smashed the painting with my giant book of mythology.  It has sat there, crushed, until just now when I worked up the courage to see if I had killed it or not. 

Not convinced that this isn't the most terrifying thing you have ever seen? 

LOOK CLOSER. 

Maybe I'm overreacting.  In general I like spiders, of all the creatures with chitinous shells and more than 2 eyes in the world, they are among the most interesting.  But what did me in was the way she was holding her legs up.  In my mind I had seen it as the spider shielding her eyes from the light and trying to blend in with her surroundings until the Hobbits past her so she could sneak up on them from behind.  But after I drew it out, I realized that what was really in my head, was her playing a weird and altogether horrifying peek-a-boo game with the Hobbits. As soon as I got that far my brain exploded and I had to put the drawing down.  A 12 foot spider playing peek-a-boo with its prey was just too much. I could not bring myself to finish this painting.

There has always been something terrifying to me about a predatory creature that is sneaking up on you as if you don't see it.  Like a lion creeping through the grass towards you, its eyes fixed, about to pounce, but acting casual. You know its about to kill you.  Seeing it in stalking mode, and knowing that it is stalking you freaks me out.

I know this is a strange thing to freak a person out, but well, there it is.  This drawing freaked me out.  The spider hiding her eyes behind her limbs, and peaking out had some deep, primordial sinister perversion to it that crossed whatever internal threshold I have for, is going to wreck your brain if you go through the process of staring at the piece for the 25 hours it will take you to paint it.   

But you are probably saying, "Well, what were you expecting Gerard? You are drawing a 12 foot spider in a dark tunnel that eats PEOPLE. Last spawn of Ungoliant, the terror of the pass of Cirith Ungol in Morder, where the freaking shadows lie. What did you think it was going to look like? A Watercolor of ducklings in a quiet pond? Adorable puppies frolicking at the beach?"

All that being said, I am not sure what I am going to do next.  I will have to think about it. 

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Next Week: Adorable Puppies Frolicking at the Beach.